Explaining early moral hypocrisy: Numerical cognition promotes equal sharing behavior in preschool‐aged children

Chernyak, Nadia; Harris, Paul L.; Cordes, Sara

doi:10.1111/desc.12695

Cited by 42 publications

(40 citation statements)

References 63 publications

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“…If yes, such results would tend to cast doubt on the first and second possibilities listed above and to support the third possibility instead. Such results would also dovetail well with recent findings that preschoolers sometimes perform poorly in first- and third-party fairness tasks due to cognitive limitations in their ability to encode and remember exact numerical information (e.g., Chernyak et al, 2016, 2019; Chernyak and Blake, 2017).…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 88%

Do Infants in the First Year of Life Expect Equal Resource Allocations?

2019

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Recent research has provided converging evidence, using multiple tasks, of sensitivity to fairness in the second year of life. In contrast, findings in the first year have been mixed, leaving it unclear whether young infants possess an expectation of fairness. The present research examined the possibility that young infants might expect windfall resources to be divided equally between similar recipients, but might demonstrate this expectation only under very simple conditions. In three violation-of-expectation experiments, 9-month-olds ( N = 120) expected an experimenter to divide two cookies equally between two animated puppets (1:1), and they detected a violation when she divided them unfairly instead (2:0). The same positive result was obtained whether the experimenter gave the cookies one by one to the puppets (Experiments 1–2) or first separated them onto placemats and then gave each puppet a placemat (Experiment 3). However, a negative result was obtained when four (as opposed to two) cookies were allocated: Infants looked about equally whether they saw a fair (2:2) or an unfair (3:1) distribution (Experiment 3). A final experiment revealed that 4-month-olds ( N = 40) also expected an experimenter to distribute two cookies equally between two animated puppets (Experiment 4). Together, these and various control results support two broad conclusions. First, sensitivity to fairness emerges very early in life, consistent with claims that an abstract expectation of fairness is part of the basic structure of human moral cognition. Second, this expectation can at first be observed only under simple conditions, and speculations are offered as to why this might be the case.

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Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 88%

Do Infants in the First Year of Life Expect Equal Resource Allocations?

2019

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“…Many children in our study allocated tokens one at a time to each box, suggesting a strategy of matching tokens to boxes or animals via one-to-one correspondence. Furthermore, even before preschoolers can count, they understand norms of equal sharing and are able to use turn-taking strategies, demonstrate awareness of the equality norm for dividing resources, and fairly distribute resources (e.g., Chernyak, Harris, & Cordes, 2019).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Developmental change in partition dependent resource allocation behavior

et al. 2020

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Partition dependence, the tendency to distribute choices differently based on the way options are grouped, has important implications for decision making. This phenomenon, observed in adults across a variety of contexts such as allocating resources or making selections from a menu of items, can bias decision makers toward some choices and away from others. Only one study to date (Reichelson, Zax, Patalano, & Barth, 2019) has investigated the developmental trajectory of this phenomenon. In the current study we investigate children's and adults' susceptibility to partitioning effects in a child-friendly resource allocation task. In Experiment 1 (N = 80), adults distributed 12 food tokens to animals at the zoo. Based on previous findings that older children show weaker partition dependence in this task, we predicted that adults might exhibit reduced partition dependent behavior: they showed none. In Experiment 2 (N = 272), we used a less transparent task with only five food tokens, predicting that both adults and children (ages 3-10 years) would show partition dependence. Children, but not adults, made partition dependent resource allocations, with younger children exhibiting greater effects than older children. These experiments provide further evidence that children's decisions, like adults' (in other tasks), are influenced by the arbitrary partitioning of the available options. This work supports previous findings that younger children may be more susceptible to these effects, and maps developmental change in partition dependent behavior from early childhood to adulthood on this child-friendly partition dependence task.

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“…This particular finding underscores the importance of going beyond studying age-related changes and studying the cognitive predictors and underpinnings of why those age-related changes occur. Recent work has taken an interest in understanding the cognitive underpinnings of prosocial behavior ( Blake et al, 2015b ; Cowell et al, 2017 ; Steinbeis and Over, 2017 ; Chernyak et al, 2018 ). Our study adds to this work by highlighting that general cognitive ability explains a substantial portion of the variance in prosocial behavior, underscoring the importance that various domain-general abilities may serve as important pre-requisites for our prosocial tendencies.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In summary, research on children’s prosociality has identified three primary forms that emerge before or by 3 years of age: instrumental helping (i.e., helping others achieve a goal; Warneken and Tomasello, 2006 ), comforting (i.e., sympathizing and offering help to those in distress; Svetlova et al, 2010 ; Dunfield, 2014 ), and costly resource sharing ( Blake and Rand, 2010 ; Chernyak and Kushnir, 2013 ; Chernyak et al, 2017 , 2018 ). Although these behaviors appear in a range of societies, all three forms have not been tested in single non-Western society.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Varieties of Young Children’s Prosocial Behavior in Zambia: The Role of Cognitive Ability, Wealth, and Inequality Beliefs

et al. 2018

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By the 3rd year of life, young children engage in a variety of prosocial behaviors, including helping others attain their goals (instrumental helping), responding to others’ emotional needs (comforting), and sharing resources (costly giving). Recent work suggests that these behaviors emerge early, during the first 2 years of life (Svetlova et al., 2010; Thompson and Newton, 2012; Dunfield and Kuhlmeier, 2013). To date, however, work investigating early varieties of prosocial behavior has largely focused on Western samples and has not assessed the impact of poverty and inequality. In this work, we investigate prosocial behavior in 3-year-olds in Zambia, a lower-middle income country with high wealth inequality. Experiments were integrated into a larger public health study along with both objective and subjective (parent) measures of wealth and inequality. Three-hundred-seventy-seven children (Mean age = 36.77 months; SD = 2.26 months) were presented with an instrumental helping task, comforting task, and two steps of a giving task – one with higher cost (children could give away their only resource) and one with lower cost (children had three resources to give). As predicted, rates of prosociality varied hierarchically by the cost of the action: instrumental helping was the most common followed by comforting, lower cost giving, and higher cost giving. All prosocial behaviors were significantly correlated with one another (with the exception of high cost giving), and with general cognitive ability. Objective family wealth did not predict any of the child’s prosocial behaviors. However, subjective beliefs showed that mothers who believed that they had more than others in their village had children who were more likely to engage in instrumental helping, and mothers who believed that village inequality was a problem had children who were more likely to engage in low cost giving. Low cost giving was also more likely for children whose parents reported reading storybooks to them. This suggests that costly giving in the context of pretend play may relate to children’s experience with using stories as representations of real life events. The results suggest both cultural differences and universalities in the development of prosociality and point to environmental factors that influence prosociality.

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Explaining early moral hypocrisy: Numerical cognition promotes equal sharing behavior in preschool‐aged children

Cited by 42 publications

References 63 publications

Do Infants in the First Year of Life Expect Equal Resource Allocations?

Do Infants in the First Year of Life Expect Equal Resource Allocations?

Developmental change in partition dependent resource allocation behavior

Varieties of Young Children’s Prosocial Behavior in Zambia: The Role of Cognitive Ability, Wealth, and Inequality Beliefs

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